But my guess is that studying applied math and CS would have been better for me per hour than studying science, and the reason I spent that time learning science was largely because I think it's exciting and cool rather than because I endorse it as a direct path to knowing things that are useful for doing alignment research
Strong upvote for this.
Doing things you find fun is extremely efficient. Studying things you don't like is inefficient, no matter how useful these things may turn out to be for alignment or x-risk.
For that prompt "she went to work at the office" was still the most common completion. But it only happened about of the time. Alternatively, GPT-3 sometimes found the completion "she was found dead". Kudos, GPT-3, you understand the prompt after all! That completion came up about of the time.
Does it really understand, though? If you replace the beginning of the prompt with "She died on Sunday the 7th", does it change the probability that the model outputs "she was found dead"?
From previous posts about this setting, the background assumption is that the child almost certainly won't permanently die if it takes 15 seconds longer to reach them.
Sure, whatever.
Honestly, that answer makes me want to engage with the article even less. If the idea is that you're supposed to know about an entire fanfiction-of-a-fanfiction canon to talk about this thought experiment, then I don't see what it's doing in the Curated feed.
I reject the parable/dilemma for another reason: in the majority of cases, I don't think it's ethical to spend so much money on a suit that you would legitimately hesitate to save a drowning child if it put the suit at risk?
If you're so rich that you can buy tailor-made suits, then sure, go save the child and buy another suit. If you're not... then why are you buying super-expensive tailor-made suits? I see extremely few situations where keeping the ability to play status games slightly better would be worth more than saving a child's life.
(And yes, there'...
As a counterpoint, here's my experience with NixOS: https://poignardazur.github.io/2021/09/08/nixos-post-mortem/
This was fun to read, but also a little awkward. This feels less like "The world if everyone was an economist" and more "The world if everyone agreed with Eliezer Yudkowsky about everything".
Some thoughts:
I don't care how strong your social norms are, you're not enforcing that pornography ban. Forget computers, it's unworkable as long as people have paper.
Same thing with sad people not reproducing. People would go "fuck social norms" and have kids anyway. People who respect the norms would be pushed out of the gene pool. I don't see how you could enf
I feel like the first two are enforceable with culture. For example I think many Muslim countries have a lot of success at preventing pornography (or at least, they did until the internet, which notably dath ilan seems to not quite have). I also have a sense that many people with severe mental/physical disabilities are implicitly treated as though they won't have children in our culture, and as a result often do not. But I agree it's hard to do it ethically, and both of the aforementioned ways aren't done very ethically in our civilization IMO.
For the latt...
I find this comment kind of aggravating.
I'll claim that the very mindset you mention starts with not taking Eliezer at face value when he half-implies he's the only per... (read more)